KINDNESS GOES A LONG WAY: SDG HACKATHON
The person who incorporated his tech knowledge with his heart filled with kindness is from Bangladesh; where he and his team made an extraordinary app for the special children in our society. Let's get introduced to this person.
His name is Shahriar Rahman.
We DYDF-India team got the opportunity to talk with him.
He
has completed his school from an English Medium School, Radiant School &
College. He was interested in medical science, but he did not get a chance to
be admitted. Then he moved to CSE in IIUC, International Islamic University
Chittagong. He was interested in software development. So, he started coding
for mobile applications from the first semester. He has spent 2 years doing
that. And up till now, he has worked in a couple of projects. From his
childhood, he has been interested and intrigued about how apps work. When he
got admitted to CSE, he started exploring app development. He got very few
tutorials on Android development. He watched and started copying all those
things that they did on the tutorials. Here started his journey as an android
developer. He started coding apps from the very beginning. Though, there are no app
development courses in the first semeste, his faculties
were supportive. He was inspired by them and got focused on his own ideas.
We all know more or less about hackathons. Those who don’t know it is an engagement of collaborative computer programming. We usually think it is all about tech hunkies wearing big specs and for people who study all day. To an extent it is right but for Shahriar it was a way to contribute for his own country, solving problems our country has. So he proceeded to participate with an innovative idea where he may not have gained the highest rank in the competition, he surely gained our hearts as he chose morality and kindness over money and fame.
All
he wanted was to help the people in need. It was his second hackathon. The
first one was at his university, like an inter-university hackathon. This
hackathon was organized by Banglalink and it was arranged on the SDG program.
He mentioned he did not expect to be there because there were 150,000
applicants applied for the hackathon. And they were top 15 that would ever
select. It was arranged in the Headquarter of Banglalink in Dhaka. There were
three members in his team. They got a total 24 hours for their project.
On
going with the interview with him we got to visualize the whole event. The
organizers provided instructors, engineers who helped them and gave them
suggestions on how they can improve their project. They started to plan for the
app, they code, and all that everything within 24 hours. He said, “It was
really tough. Because designing the UI from scratch was tough to achieve.
And we came up with this idea that we could make a like educational platform
for the autistic students, because they were the ones we least think about. People are not as concerned about them as they are about us. When we were about
half way through, one of the instructors came in, and asked us about the
business plan; because now they needed a business plan with whatever project
you have. As the bitter truth prevails ; everything is about money in the end.
So, we were so confused about the fact how we could do business with those
precious little souls? Wouldn’t it be unethical? We had to rethink everything and had to come up with some sort of a business plan. Then we actually
somehow made a business plan with that app, like, we forced some subscriptions
into that such as if they want to access through some content in the
application they have to go through some advertisement. So, after 24 hours,
we had to present our app to the first panel of judges. There was the
second screening; the second filtering. And they chose 10 projects from the 50
and Alhamdulillah! we were one of those tents. So, after that, they gave us
one more hour to prepare it furthermore, to give the final presentation. After
an hour, we gave the final presentation. There they chose the champions.
Unfortunately, we couldn't be any one of those three, but rank wise we came
forward. I'm not disappointed at all that we couldn't achieve the first three
ranks because we didn't have a proper business plan. And somewhere, I did not
even find it moral to do business with.”
Further into the interview as we asked about his teammates, he had to say “My team members, they are actually my university friends and we were in the same semester of the same class. One of them is a graphics designer, and he's already working as a professional. And the other one, he is a very good coder and is very good at competitive programming and he is a second-year student and is already a teaching assistant in his own university. So among us, the one who likes graphic designing, he designed the logo, and the whole UI, the color scheme of the app and all that. I gave him the name. He designed the logo, according to that; and the one I said about the competitive programmer, is he helped me out with logics that worked behind the app, I coded the app. Yeah, that's how we three actually worked in that.”
As for now you tell it was a very fun interview, he moved on to telling us about the app itself. There are some factors we need to know before assembling a mobile application. The main thing as per Shahriar is Flutter. He explained flutter to be, “To know what Flutter is, we need to know what framework is. If I give you an example, like Android Studio, which is very mainstream, pretty common in use in the general people; as I, myself started with Android Studio. So Android Studio, is actually a framework that was developed based on the Java programming language. So, frameworks, they take the basic general languages, and they tweak it and make packages with those languages, which are better for the developers to use. Because, for example, if I tell you to create a button with codes, then you must enter if you're using raw code, then you'll have to write like 10s of 1000s of lines, probably to make one button. So what those engineers do, they actually take those 10s of 1000s of codes and create a package with those and just, they create one key word to make a button. So that is a framework. And if you're talking about flutter itself, it is a framework. And it was developed by Google. And the language that works behind it is Dart. Dart itself is Google's own language. And the spatiality of this framework is that it's, like, very easy to use. And like, if you know anything about CSS or HTML, it's even easier than CSS and HTML. It is so easy that anyone without programming knowledge can use flutter to create beautiful UI. But yeah, here's the thing actually, flutter is a front-end language. And it's actually very easy and convenient. And another very vital thing about flutter is that if you know we know that our iOS development and Android development is two different things. If you are using flutter, you can code one app that will work in both the OS at the same time. Like, you don't have to code separately for the two different OS. So, that is what, in layman's term.” As beautifully as he explained the whole process, he also told us about his tech icon, who admires and follows. “I can say I have an icon. And no, he's not like any renowned one or anything is, like, one of my big brothers. He's a software engineer himself. He has his own projects, his own apps and all that, actually very hardworking and he knows a lot about software developments. He inspires me. He always says this, it does not matter how you are doing academically, those things don't define what you can actually do. That was a very big motivation for me, because I was really shattered when I couldn't get into a medical college because that was my dream there. But, he came in and he inspired me a lot. I then started learing tech, because somewhere I had interest in that, and I'm here today.”
Asking about his next ambitions he says, “I have a very big event coming this month. And the name of the event is Big, organized by the Bangladesh government. It is a contest for the startups and you explain your ideas. If you have any implementation of those already, you show those to them. And if you get selected, then, you know, they will fund you for your startup ideas. Yeah, I am participating in that contest. That is the next move that I am going to make.”
We DYDF-India team wishes him the best and all the success he deserves in the world.
DYDF-India Family
"A small Bangladesh in the heart of India"
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